The Hidden Light of Objects (8 page)

A few coded lines a year for over a decade, and then, the second horror, an event for which there could be no code.

Sunday, September 9, 2001. Mother dead
meant that disease had wracked her mother’s fading body for ten months, that tubes and machines had been intimately involved, and that she had slipped away forever one quiet afternoon in a medically induced sleep. Unequivocally.

*  *  *

Fifteen years after Mina’s decision to burn her childhood, her adolescence, to burn, essentially, herself, regret began its steady throb. The diary flow had slowed to an irregular trickle. There was no need for words when once wide-open dreams were slamming shut like shop-fronts in the gold
souk
at midday prayer. Mina’s coil of potential was now so tightly wound it was a knot inside her. The whirl of stories, half true, half something besides, stopped. She felt as futile as a mirage, all shimmer and no quench. She became what all children of promise and their teachers dread most: ordinary. Her life without words was as dull as stale cornflakes. But this she could have lived with because extraordinary events continued to happen even if nobody happened to write them down. What had become unbearable to her was not so much the absence of words present as the lament for words past.

The realization crept up innocently enough early one morning in her mother’s bird garden. Unlike her grandmother’s room, her mother’s garden was not full of glamorous varieties. It attracted plain little sparrows that stopped to drink cool water from the terracotta dish hanging from the wide lacy branches of an old
sidr
tree. Her mother would thoughtfully fill the dish for them every morning at dawn. After her death, Mina continued to do the same, though, unlike her mother, she didn’t especially enjoy waking up early. Sometimes she slept late, and on those days small panting birds were left thirsty for hours, blinking at each other in confusion from across a dry dish. However, on this particular morning, Mina had managed to wake early enough to avoid guilt over parched chirps. She provided cool water then stretched her bones out on the grass.

The sun was not yet overhead and it was breezy enough to forget that only two months earlier it would have been impossible to spend five minutes outside air-conditioned space. Mina was doing what people do when they have half an hour or so to kill before work or errands or taking care of responsibilities that once belonged to someone else. She was musing in random patches. Fidgety thoughts rested for a second or two before moving along. Her finger played casually with her bellybutton – that funny little cave which at one time linked her flesh so intimately to her mother’s. A stray petal of bougainvillea landed on her exposed belly.

In Kuwait, bougainvillea is called
mejnooneh
, crazy, notably in the feminine. Crazy because the fuchsia tissues multiply with an exuberance bordering on madness despite the heat and dryness. That this unique form of insanity was marked feminine always appealed to Mina the diarist who, as a girl, imagined writing down her observations, her owlish insights, on hundreds, thousands, millions of crazy petals in gold ink and then releasing them into a sky as tragically blue as the Mediterranean. She pictured the massive cloud of pink tissue petals, gilded feathers without bird bodies to keep them together. She thought of the people who might glance up expecting to see nothing more exotic than a pigeon only to find a ball of fuchsia rustling overhead, low enough to reach up and grab. Each person would end up with a single petal. If they were lucky, it would be meaningful to them. If not, and they happened to be standing beside someone who had also grabbed at the impossible floating pinkness, an exchange could be arranged. For example,
It is sometimes unreasonable to expect the world to mirror your responses
could be traded for
Cacti that look like artichokes are wrapped blessings
. Or,
To be left alone in a lonely place means only that joy is invisible, not absent
might be swapped in favor of
Stairs may lead to nowhere and doors may open onto a steep drop
. The young Mina had filled pages and pages with her fragments, believing, with a degree of arrogance masquerading as largesse, that one day they would firework the desert skies as never before.

Mina tried to peel the
mejnooneh
petal off her belly with her thumb and forefinger, attempting, unsuccessfully, to keep it intact. It was crushed, leaving in its place the electric pink dust that memories are made of. Inhaling this memory dust was pleasant enough at first. Fuchsia tissue petals and gold ink, parrot feathers and mysterious pouches, recommended books and
The Wizard of Oz
. But it wasn’t long before towering paper sky scrapers began to shadow the horizon and, worse still, to come tumbling down. Red triangle corners started to bleed into the white muslin of memories fluttering in her head. She felt the loss of each moment twice, first to flames, then to time. Mild discomfort turned into a gigantic concrete brick of anxiety lodged tightly in her throat. She couldn’t swallow, but she ached to regurgitate the pages burned to ashes. What had she done? What had she done? She descended into a notebook-shaped hell of her own making. She was now in her thirties with a lost-and-gone-for-ever past and a future she couldn’t put into words. She had shed her writing skin with such effervescent ease. Now she was paying a price that had not been disclosed up front. She didn’t know how to sweep the ashes back to the place where words resided.

After the morning in the garden, the brick-in-the-throat panic would knock Mina out anywhere, any time of day or night. There were no special triggers after the petal of bougainvillea, though she got into the habit of reading the world as a basket of signs addressed especially to her. Without being aware of it – it had become an unconscious tic – she would go through the day trying to single out which sign would this time jolt her back to the years she could not rewrite. Which mark among many would fill her mouth with a cement taste she could not rinse out? Would it be that snag in her navy pleated skirt? That light sneaking through the keyhole? That chewed-up red pencil with the small plastic compass attached? That faded white box in the gutter melting a touch more every day? That folded paper boat with the finger smudges? That fish in the heavy silver tray? In her head she prepared compressed captions for the proliferating signs around her, which she registered as Polaroid shots:

Snag in navy blue

Sneaky light

Teeth-pocked pencil

Melting boxes

Folded boat

Fish

While the others remained in her head, this last one she wrote down thoughtfully in a slim notebook of cheap recycled paper she had recently bought at the supermarket.
Fish
.

And then curiously and without warning, after two years of caption lists and bricked-up breathing, after seventeen years of diary death, something more.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004. When my mother died, the fish in the sea committed collective suicide. Millions upon millions of broken fish washed up on shore and the entire country smelled of rotting corpses. It should have been a national emergency, but it wasn’t. Private citizens responded in odd and quiet ways. Some walked along the silvered shoreline shaking their heads in dismay, mouths and noses sheathed with head scarves and hands. Others stayed home to avoid breathing the noxious air, as they had in the days of the burning wells. Public announcements declared that only the heads were poisonous but that all other fish flesh was healthy to consume. Fish head soup out; fried fish tails in. Newspaper experts objected to government claims but offered no explanations of their own. It didn’t matter since there were neither heads nor tails of fish left in the sea to eat. People murmured jagged concern in private corners. But mostly the population just got on with a life without fish. I, however, like a forgotten phantom at the end of a dark corridor, cannot get on with a life without fish. I mourn for them, for my mother, for the loss of my life in the present tense.

IV

Ice in the desert. Not in Switzerland or Germany or Wisconsin. Not in a place where lakes turn milky as waters slow in late autumn, then stop for a while. To walk into an ice rink in the full heat of the desert and to feel your cheeks rise pink is miraculous and makes you believe that anything, just about anything, is possible.

Every Wednesday, the last day of the school week, we would all meet at the rink in the early evening. Standing around outside before the doors opened, we would eye the competition from other schools and try to find out what was happening that weekend, where the party was going to be. At the rink: the best greasy fries in the world and Michael Jackson blaring, a star, a hero, and, we were convinced, Billie Jean’s lover. At the rink: learning to lace up skates, learning that kissing involves wetness, tongues, time. At the rink: holding tingling hands with girls, with boys, with both if you wanted, knowing it was all right, Michael muffling the wail of mosques outside.

Alex would come to the ice rink to skate seriously. He played hockey on Sundays and Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, he would whizz through the rest of us, blades so sharp they sprayed a fan of snow when he stopped, hard and sudden. There’s an Alex at every school – beautiful, athletic, smart. But the Alex at our school was also distant, like he was hiding something, which made him even more wondrous in our eyes. We all worshipped Alex – German-Palestinian god – whose second cousin on his father’s side would, in a few years, accidentally blow himself up in a garden. Alex was the girls’ common denominator, our irresistible sorcerer. Kissing Alex at the rink – just that once – was kissing moonlit perfection. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I lifted my chin up to meet Alex’s lips. A throwaway kiss at the rink, like kissing glory. We hardly exchanged a word. We exchanged, instead, our youth in small, private packets. In that worn army jacket, he was, for an instant, mine. He smiled so rarely, tall, flawless Adonis, but that night – just that once – he smiled for me.

Years later, I heard from someone, I can’t remember who, that Alex was damaged, somehow broken. It’s very possible. Alex was, after all, too good for the universe to allow to be true for too long. That night at Elsa’s, all I could do was jump up and down on her bed screaming, “I kissed Alex! I kissed Alex!” It could never, not ever, get better than Alex at the rink.

Playing with Bombs

Death is not what they promised. No one-way ticket to paradise. No special dispensation for martyrs. No
houri
s. Those
houri
s were supposed to be awesome. I looked all over for them after the blast. Nothing. Time seems to pass over here, though I’m not exactly sure how it moves. In the ways that count, I think I’m still fifteen.

I had friends who could identify every specimen of bomb. I would stand around rolling my eyes and gnawing into my cheek as they rattled off names, model numbers, and destructive capabilities. Some of them sat around all day making lists like the ones kids in normal places make of their favorite athletes or rock stars. I was surprised they didn’t hide posters of artillery under their pillows in place of
Playboy
centerfolds. My best friend Rami had photocopies of
Playboy
pictures hidden under his bed, and, God forgive us, they were fantastic.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less about explosives. I hated what they did and never got angry enough to want to use them, not even against our sworn enemies. That made me different – a loner, an outsider, on the fringe. Oh, and I loved that. I was fifteen and reading Camus and Dostoevsky, what do you want from me? A couple of years earlier, there was the
intifada
. That was a dynamite moment, and I was as fired up as all my friends were. Everyone who knew me made fun of the fact that at last something had yanked me out of my corner and into the streets. “From books to stones, eh, Nimr? This is what it takes to get your head out of the clouds?” I would have been a stone myself if I hadn’t been stirred by what kids like me were trying to do. While stones are weapons, they aren’t bombs. I felt I could get behind stones with a clean conscience. The other side didn’t use stones to fight back, I promise you. To even the field, our side started to pick up less innocent objects too. That’s when I drifted back up into my clouds. Not everyone is made for fighting.

I was the youngest of four boys. My mother always said, “Three for me and one for the cause.” I figured, being the youngest, I was okay. Little did I know. Don’t get me wrong, I cared about the cause. I wanted liberation for Palestine as much as anyone. I was sick of being caged in, tired of having to shuffle paper to move from A to B, fed up, most of all, of watching my dad struggle to piece together in his mind his decimated village, his father’s rock-smashed knees. Most of the time, though, I worried about other stuff. I wanted to figure out this whole girl thing. I was desperate for a girlfriend and thought I was making headway with Sireen. Sireen’s hair looked like Medusa’s, whose picture I had seen in a book about art my father kept in the glass cabinet with all his special books: the
OED
,
The Times Atlas of the World
, and the one on human anatomy with glossy foldouts. She scared me a little, Sireen. She was wild, I could tell. I was sure we were destined to be together. She lived next door and we saw a lot of each other coming and going. I let my eyes linger. Her eyes would dart away quickly, then come back slowly. I knew she probably liked me too.